New York Times correspondent Alan Cowell issued a moralistic “Memo from London” on Monday on the humble joys of post-World War II austerity compared to today, where the "have-nots" are tempted by things they cannot have: “As the riots in London and elsewhere in August seemed to show, the profound gulf between haves and have-nots has been magnified by the inequalities and envies of a society that has built its newest altars to consumption and greed.”

Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.

“Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple ‘utility furniture’ until 1952, food until 1954,” he wrote in a memoir, concluding that austerity in “that bare-bones age” was “not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic.”

It was not just in Britain.

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The difference now is that the taste for wealth, the aspiration to automatic betterment and the assumption of ever-expanding horizons have become universal, cemented by the growth of the European Union and the adoption of a single currency, the euro, that has spread a leavening of prosperity among the 17 countries in the union that use it.

In Mr. Judt’s early days, after the grinding deprivation of a world war, austerity trumped global conflict. Now, the point of departure is prosperity, a fool’s paradise in which Europeans came to see affluence as a state of being, a birthright.

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As the riots in London and elsewhere in August seemed to show, the profound gulf between haves and have-nots has been magnified by the inequalities and envies of a society that has built its newest altars to consumption and greed.

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In Mr. Judt’s day, austerity guaranteed a minimum level of access to basic supplies, the harbinger of better days; now, austerity is about the removal or diminution of jobs, pensions, comforts and benefits that have accrued since then -- the herald, thus, of much darker times.

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